A Good Day To Die

by Simon Kernick

‘Yeah, that was that.’ She looked down at the table.

  ‘The schizophrenia Ann was suffering from. Did the psychiatrist say what had caused it?’ This time the pause was longer. ‘I can find out, you know, but I’d rather hear it from you.’

  Grant leaned forward suddenly. ‘The doctor who diagnosed her said that she thought it stemmed from her past. Apparently she’d been abused by her father when she was very young, and it was something to do with that.’

  He took a generous swig from his beer, before pulling a metal tobacco tin from his pocket. I watched his hands as he took out a roll-up and lit it with a cheap plastic lighter. They were shaking slightly. He took a drag and blew a mouthful of smoke towards the empty chair beside me. I took out my own cigarettes, watching Andrea now, and offered her one. She shook her head and told me she’d quit.

  ‘Why are you so interested in talking about Ann’s psychiatric problems?’ she demanded.

  I could have said that it was because she and Grant were so interested in not talking about them, but I didn’t. Instead I asked another question. ‘Ann’s allegations about her father. Did anyone ever follow them up? Presumably, if the judge believed the psychiatrist about her schizophrenia and what had initially caused it, then the police must have launched some sort of investigation into her father’s alleged abuse.’

  ‘Yeah, they did,’ said Grant. ‘And they nicked him as well. But they never got him to trial. He got released on bail and absconded.’

  I felt my skin crawl.

  A stifling hotel room in Manila a year ago. A man who wanted to kill a little girl.

  ‘And now he’s got what he deserved,’ added Andrea, her voice full of barely suppressed rage.

  I turned to her and was surprised at the intensity of her expression. She was staring right at me, the earlier furtiveness now completely gone.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked her, even though I was suddenly very sure of exactly what she meant.

  ‘After he absconded, he left the country,’ she said, ‘and the next thing anyone heard he’d turned up dead in a hotel room somewhere in Asia. Someone had shot him, and good riddance to the bastard too.’

  ‘I read something about that,’ I said. ‘But I don’t remember it involving someone called Ann Taylor.’

  ‘No,’ said Andrea. ‘That’s because Ann changed her name after she ran away from home. Her real name was Sonya Blacklip.’

  28

  Andrea clammed up again after that, as if she sensed she’d said too much. And I guess she had, because by now I was beginning to get an angle on things. Grant clammed up as well, and although I kept them there for another ten minutes, I didn’t find out anything else of interest.

  Before they went, Andrea told me that they just wanted to be left alone, and implored me to respect their wishes. I said I would, feeling sorry for them as I watched them leave with their heads down and shoulders hunched, fearful of the consequences of my unwelcome entry into their lives. But I wasn’t sure it was a promise I could keep. They knew a lot more than they were telling me, and I could only assume that Ann Taylor had told Andrea something, which Andrea had then told Grant; something that with Ann’s death they’d sworn to keep quiet.

  Ann’s father, Richard Blacklip, had appeared in a photograph with Les Pope. Pope had ordered the deaths of Malik and Jason Khan. Khan was Blacklip’s daughter’s boyfriend. Connections. Plenty of connections. But where, and to whom, did they all lead?

  Fifteen minutes later I was walking down the Essex Road, not really thinking where I was going as I talked on the phone to Emma. She hadn’t found out anything of great interest about Thadeus, or any links they might have had with either Malik, Pope or Nicholas Tyndall, and was still waiting for her contact to come back with the phone numbers listed on Slippery Billy’s mobile. When I told her I needed details of Ann Taylor’s illness, and who had treated her, she was none too pleased.

  ‘I’ve got a lot on, Dennis. We’ve got an editorial meeting at three o’clock and I’ve got to be home at five thirty for the window guy. I’ve already spent hours on this.’

  ‘Please. It’s important.’

  ‘Why? What’s it got to do with the case?’

  ‘Just trust me on this, OK? This once. Honestly, Emma, I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it could lead to something.’

  She sighed loudly, but said she’d do what she could and I said I’d call her later.

  I hung up and realized that I was standing outside the Half Moon pub. I’d drunk in here a few times back in the old days and it was less than half a mile from the police station where I’d spent so much of my working life, and only a few hundred yards from Islington Green and the bright lights of Upper Street. I stopped and peered in the window. Two old guys were sat at the bar laughing and smoking, while a barman I didn’t recognize polished a glass behind them. I’d known the landlord here once upon a time. I’d pop in on the occasional afternoon after I’d worked an early shift, and we’d have a few pints together and a chinwag in the welcoming half-light of the lounge bar. I wondered if he was still here and even thought about going in. Thought about it seriously for a couple of seconds. It looked warm and inviting.

  It was also too close to the old stomping ground. Too risky. Even letting it cross my mind was a stupid idea. I could never go back in here. Not now. Not in a month. Not ever. It was the past and the past for me was a closed book.

  But the past never truly lets you go, even the parts you wish to forget. In the three days since I’d returned to this city, the yawning chasm that had been the days, the months, the years away, had shrunk to nothing. Every step, every smell, every familiar street had dragged me backwards through time, and now, with Andrea’s mention of Coleman House, the ghosts of my last bitter days here were rising to haunt me again: the innocent dead; the guilty dead; and, of course, the mysterious and beautiful Carla Graham, the woman who for a few fleeting moments I’d felt closer to than any other.

  I stood there in the pale winter sunlight for longer than I should have done, until the cold began to seep beneath my skin. Finally, I turned and retraced my steps, pleased to be escaping from reminders of the old days. But as I walked, the ghosts of the dead shifted and swirled around me, reluctant, as always, to release me from their grip.

  29

  ‘Sonya Blacklip,’ said Emma, telling me something I already knew.

  She was sitting cross-legged on her orange sofa, dressed in a plain, loose-fitting white T-shirt and blue jeans. Her freshly washed hair fell loosely over her shoulders, and she was drinking one of the four-pack of Fosters I’d brought with me when I’d turned up at her place a few minutes earlier. She looked remarkably fragrant and relaxed, given the twenty-four hours she’d had. I was drinking from one of the other cans too and smoking a cigarette while I sat on the chair opposite, listening to what she had to say. It had just turned seven p.m., and I was feeling pretty relaxed myself.

  ‘... Was the real name of Ann Taylor,’ I added.

  ‘That’s right.’ She then gave me a thorough rundown of what she had learnt about Ann, corroborating everything that Andrea and Grant had told me earlier.

  ‘The course of psychotherapy that Ann was put on began in October of last year, and the doctor in charge of it was a woman called ...’ She paused while she consulted her notebook. ‘... Madeline Cheney, and from what I can gather she’s an expert in her field. She’s spent years studying the retrieval and reconstruction of memory. And after a number of one-to-one sessions with Ann, she managed to coax from her aspects of her past that Ann hadn’t talked about to anyone else. What Dr Cheney found out made grim reading. I haven’t been able to get all the details – most of it’s not in the public domain – but she made a written submission to the court in which she testified that, in her opinion, Ann had suffered extensive sexual abuse as a child at the hands of her father, starting when she was as young as four, shortly after her mother died, and continuing until the age of eleven, at which point she finally ran away from h
ome, and ended up here in London.’ Emma paused for a moment and looked at me. ‘The claims were pretty horrific. According to the testimony, it wasn’t just her father who abused her, but his friends too, and there were other children who also suffered at the hands of the same group. However, when the police investigated, they never identified any of them, and the only person who faced any charges relating to the abuse was Ann’s father, Richard. But he skipped bail, and ended up murdered in a hotel in Manila before the case ever came to trial.’

  ‘I need to speak to Dr Cheney,’ I said. ‘Where does she practise? Do you know?’

  ‘You don’t ask for much, do you? I’ve got her number and address here.’ She waved her notebook in my direction. ‘But I’d like to know what this has got to do with the murders of Malik and Khan.’

  I sipped my beer, thinking once again that I had a real soft spot for this girl. I told her about my question-and-answer session with Jamie Delly, including the situation I’d found him in, and the second session I’d had with Andrea and Grant.

  Emma seemed more concerned about why Tyndall’s men were torturing Delly than the actual torture itself. ‘That suggests that Tyndall didn’t actually have anything to do with the shooting of Malik and Khan, doesn’t it? Because if he had, surely he’d have known what the two of them were meeting about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘And if that’s the case, then who sent me that doll with the blood on?’

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  ‘But there’s something you’re not telling me,’ she stated firmly. ‘Because nothing you’ve said so far points to Ann Taylor’s mental state having anything to do with any of this. So what is it?’

  ‘I think Andrea and Grant know more than they were letting on. They were very keen to avoid talking about Ann Taylor – particularly her psychotherapy.’

  Emma shook her head. ‘No, there’s more to it than that. And I want to know what it is.’

  There was no way I could avoid the question now. We’d reached a crux in our brief relationship. It’s always been a habit of mine to absorb as much information as possible from the people I talk to, while giving out the absolute minimum. There’s nothing to be gained from telling people your innermost secrets; doing that just makes you vulnerable. But this time I knew I was going to have to come clean. If I gave her any more grounds for suspicion, our partnership was finished.

  ‘I got the names of the people whose numbers you gave me on Saturday,’ she continued. ‘The ones that supposedly came from Les Pope’s mobile. One of the numbers on there also belongs to Les Pope. So what was he doing phoning himself? Unless, of course, you were bullshitting me and they didn’t come from Pope’s phone at all, but from someone else’s. Which seems a lot more likely, don’t you think?’

  On the night I’d met her in the Ben Crouch Tavern, I’d observed that something in Emma’s girlish demeanour invited people to underestimate her, and I’d made exactly that mistake. I suspected that I wasn’t the first.

  ‘All right. I’ll tell you what I know and how I know it, but be prepared not to like what you hear.’

  She gave a hollow laugh. ‘You’re a self-confessed mass murderer. Don’t worry, I’m fully prepared on that front.’

  So I told her. About Blacklip; about Slippery Billy West; about everything. The only things I kept from her were the locations of the killings, and where I’d been these past three years, but even that would have been fairly obvious, given where Blacklip’s corpse had been found.

  When I’d finished she didn’t speak for a while. Instead she just sat there watching me. She gave no indication of how she felt, although it wasn’t that hard to guess. I lit a cigarette and wondered if it was worth my while trying to justify what I’d done. In the end, I decided it wasn’t. She knew that one of the men I’d killed had been a violent and long-standing child abuser, and that the other had been the hitman who’d slain Malik and Jason Khan. That should have been justification enough.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘You didn’t need to know. And it wouldn’t have made you feel any better about me, would it?’

  She started to say something, but I put up a hand to stop her. I could hear movement outside – the shuffling of feet.

  We both listened.

  The only sound in the room was the faint tinny chattering of the TV in the corner.

  A loud knock on the door startled us both. We looked at each other.

  The knock came again. ‘Emma, are you there?’ The voice was naturally loud – deep and authoritative. ‘It’s DCI Barron. I’m here with DS Boyd. We’d like a quick word, if we could.’

  Emma looked alarmed. She glanced over at me for guidance and I motioned for her to let them in. I got up, picked up the ashtray I was using and my drink, and headed for the staircase, trying to keep as quiet as possible.

  ‘Just coming,’ I heard Emma call as I reached the third stair.

  By the time she’d opened the door I was on the landing, leaning over the edge of the staircase to listen to whatever DCI Barron and his colleague had to say, and hoping that Emma didn’t take the opportunity to get her name in lights and a plum job on one of the nationals by telling them about the fugitive currently in her house. I might have trusted her implicitly that morning but I wasn’t so sure now, not with the law on the doorstep, and me having just admitted that there were a further two murders to add to my rapidly growing list of crimes.

  ‘What can I do for you both?’ I heard Emma ask as they came into the house and she offered them seats.

  ‘You were asking about a gentleman by the name of Jamie Delly last night,’ said Barron. ‘You called one of my colleagues, John Gallan, asking if he had Delly’s address. Would that be right?’

  Emma must have said something in the affirmative, because Barron asked why she’d wanted to know.

  ‘I wanted to speak to him about his brother, Jason,’ she answered. ‘As part of my own investigation.’

  The female officer, Boyd, then spoke, but her voice was quieter and I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Something about Emma’s articles, it sounded like, and her tone was more abrupt.

  Barron interjected to inform Emma that the police had been called to Jamie’s flat that morning. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye on him as part of our investigation into the Malik/Khan murders, and we received a call this morning from one of his neighbours saying there was a disturbance going on at his place, and the sounds of a struggle. DS Boyd and I were the first to attend. We saw a tall, slim, bearded man of about forty leaving the premises, but he disappeared before we could apprehend him. When we arrived at the flat we found Mr Delly semi-naked in his bathtub having suffered a number of very nasty injuries which suggested he’d been tortured. He’s being treated in hospital now.’

  Boyd asked Emma whether she knew of anyone fitting that description who might have had links with the case.

  Emma said she didn’t, and I offered her a silent thank-you. But I wondered how long it would take them to link the description to the man who’d been involved in the Soho shootings. A while yet, I hoped. There was a lot of CCTV footage to go through and I’d been wearing completely different clothes. But it was a worry.

  ‘What did you think Jamie Delly could tell you about Jason?’ asked Boyd, her voice louder and clearer now.

  Emma said this was her business, but Boyd replied that given what had happened that morning it was police business as well.

  ‘I’m still interested in finding a motive for the murders,’ Emma explained. ‘It’s a high-profile case but it doesn’t seem to be moving very fast. I thought Jamie might be able to shed some light on things. I was going to visit him tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, he’s not saying anything to us,’ said Barron, ‘so if you get any information out of him, please let us know.’

  Emma said she would.

  The conversation continued with Barron and Boyd trying to find out
where Emma was with her own investigations. Barron then suggested that, given the tone of her articles, she should be extra vigilant in case she herself became a target, which was when she told them about the break-in the previous night and the bloodied doll that had been left behind as a warning. After admonishing her for not reporting the incident, and asking to see the doll, he became even more forceful in his warnings. His tone was genuine enough, though, and I was confident that the main reason he was saying all this was because he was worried for her. I wasn’t sure I could say the same about Boyd. Her manner was more hostile, which I suppose was understandable. As a woman she wouldn’t be so easily impressed by a pretty girl, and, like most coppers, she didn’t like journalists nosing into her investigations, particularly when those journalists were being critical.

  ‘We can offer you police protection if you like,’ said Barron, promising to take the doll to the station for further examination, but Emma declined.

  Boyd then asked if she could use the bathroom. I heard her get to her feet as Emma told her it was first left at the top of the stairs.

  As Boyd climbed the stairs, I retreated into Emma’s bedroom and went round to the far side of her bed, feeling like a kid again as I sunk to my hands and knees and made myself as inconspicuous as possible in the darkness.

  I heard her reach the top of the stairs, but rather than go straight on into the bathroom, she stopped. A second later, the door to the bedroom made a scuffing noise as it was pushed open, and I could sense her in here with me. She moved swiftly across the carpet and I suddenly wondered what on earth I’d do if she discovered me here: the man she’d seen that morning at Delly’s place, hunched on the floor in front of her. I began to sweat.

  A few more steps and she was almost on me. I gritted my teeth and remained as still as possible, silencing even my breathing and resisting the urge to go for my gun.

  It was only when her legs were three feet away from my head that she stopped, and I could see her looking around Emma’s desk. She opened the desk drawer and had a quick poke about inside. It looked like she had plastic police-issue gloves on.